With the certificate, the baccalaureate and the partial exams approaching at high speed, the checks are coming one after the other. Researchers say it clearly: many students still revise poorly, even though we now know which methods really make it possible to retain information in the long term.
At school, we rarely learn how to learn. Everyone then develops their own little habits: some make revision sheets, others highlight their lessons and many spend their evenings going through the same pages over and over again thinking that “it’s going to fit”. Except that memory specialists explain that solid learning goes through several stages: discovering a concept, consolidating it, then being able to find it again later without help. And this last step is often the most complicated. Because between recognizing a lesson when it is before our eyes and managing to bring it out in front of a blank copy at 8 a.m., there is a world of difference.
Indeed, for years, researchers have been working on what really helps memorize. Alice Latimier, doctor in cognitive sciences and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, is one of those studying these mechanisms. His work shows that memory works much better when the brain is forced to make an active effort to retrieve information. Basically, it’s not the time spent in front of your notebook that matters the most, but what you do during that time.
In this context, there are techniques that force the brain to reconstruct information instead of simply recognizing it. And contrary to what one might believe, hesitating, searching or even making mistakes helps enormously in learning. Researchers speak of “desirable difficulty”. The idea is simple: effective learning requires a minimum of mental effort.
Very concretely, specialists advise asking questions about the course without watching it, doing short quizzes, reciting a definition out loud or even trying to explain a chapter to someone. Thus, students who test themselves regularly retain information better and retrieve it more easily during exams. According to Alice Latimier, students who simply reread the same lesson several times will have more difficulty memorizing than others since this mainly promotes short-term memory and maintains this famous “illusion of mastery.
Another essential point: timing. Many students continue, wrongly, to bet everything on big last-minute revision sessions. However, studies show that the brain retains much better when revisions are spread over time, over several days or weeks, rather than concentrated in one go. And, moreover, sleep also plays an important role in this process, since it helps to consolidate the information learned during the day. In short, revision sessions at the last minute and until one in the morning should also be avoided.
